Given how famous Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are, it’s no surprise that, one year and a couple of months into their well-scrutinized relationship, their romance is getting the “soft biopic” treatment.
America has no royal family, so we have to make do with pop idols and football players, and when the stars (and managers’ schedules) align and two of them happen to couple up with each other, we treat them like they’re about to run the country. The obsession becomes cinematic in scope, and companies like Hallmark and Lifetime rush to fill the obvious void with low-budget and highly-viewed dramatizations of the phenomenon. Profit ensues.
There’s only one problem: No version of Swift and Kelce’s love story could ever top the real-life one they’re actually living out. When you think about it, it all seems kind of fake—or at least, if it was the plot of an actual movie, it would be too perfect, too clean.
Pop sensation Taylor Swift’s (still ongoing) worldwide Eras Tour, during which she performs for three hours per night singing hits from every “era” of her career, is the highest-grossing tour of all time and the first ever to rake in more than $1 billion. Travis Kelce, considered one of the greatest football tight ends of all time, holds multiple receiving records and has led the Kansas City Chiefs to three Super Bowl wins, the latest during his relationship with Swift. They’re what the average high schooler imagines when they hear the word “power couple.”
In between it all, I think it’s safe to assume that the two like each other a lot and spend pleasant holidays with their families. They seem like two relatively pleasant people who were interested enough to give it a shot, enjoy each other’s company, enjoy the attention, and have both been famous for long enough to be able to compartmentalize the extreme level of public scrutiny they exist under.
I imagine they hang out on the couch and watch TV and text with emojis and have fun traveling together to their respective high profile events. It’s easy to imagine these things, because the two of them emanate a sort of easy normie serenity that allows us to comfortably regress a little bit, feeling like schoolkids following the Prom King and Queen around the halls. (It’s actually kind of funny we haven’t had a teen version of the Tayvis chronicles yet—though I suppose that’s what High School Musical is for.)
The cinematic versions of their romance that we do have must work even harder to extrapolate any sort of drama out of these proceedings. Hallmark’s Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story has so much official Chiefs™ branding—the entire plot revolves around a magical knitted Chiefs hat—there’s barely room for its Swelce-lite storyline: She’s a small town Chiefs fan, he’s the director of fan engagement at her family’s favorite team, sparks fly, etc. Lifetime’s return volley, a similar holiday romance titled Christmas in the Spotlight, is closer to reality while also having a little more urgency: She’s a big pop star struggling with inspiration, he’s a pro football player unsure what else he wants from life, sparks fly, etc.
The two movies, taken together, act like two halves of a whole: one of them has all the real-world “stuff,” the other has the real-world “plot.” Or, at least, as much of a plot as one could draw from two very famous people whose personal lives are nonetheless extremely private. We project what we want them to be onto the paper doll versions of themselves that they present—really the only way to exist in the world as a famous person—in both reality and fantasy.
We flood professional lip-readers with video clips of Taylor Swift and Donna Kelce chatting during games while walled off in their VIP box. We imagine conversations about food recipes and puzzles that Taylor and Travis might have in their homes because we can’t be there in person to witness them. We’re desperate to know what’s really going on while also perfectly content to imagine the most satisfying version of it for ourselves. The tightrope walked by these “inspired by” movies spans two dimensions, one real, one fake, to bring us just enough of our wildest dreams to keep us coming back for more.
